Trazzler on Facebook, Take 2

The first version of Trazzler on Facebook was a little quiz that gave you a travel personality and provided trip recommendations. The quiz questions were a bit goofy and the results were hardly scientific, but we liked the recommendations. With a modest amount of information and a pinch of good taste, we were able to provide decent suggestions.

One of our early users told us, "when I first added this application, the places and activities it suggested for me were absolutely accurate -- art, music, theater, museums." He went on to say that our accuracy petered out after 10 recommendations--and he was right. But unsurprisingly, a little bit of personalization made our recommendations sort of useful. At least more useful than the junk I've been getting in travel email newsletters for the last 10 years. I’ve probably seen more than 100,000 links in these travel emails and I can't recall clicking on any of them.

We liked the life our recommendations on Facebook took on, too. Email newsletters are confined to your inbox. On Facebook, good recommendations live on in the News Feed. We decided to build on this.

The second version of Trazzler on Facebook is much more sophisticated. Instead of a quiz, we have thousands of hand-crafted trips that you can browse and add to your Wishlist. Now it is you who gets to send recommendations--to your facebook friends. As you do this, Trazzler gets to know you and learns about your taste in travel in a more natural way. For now, we lean heavily on your location for your recommendations “algorithm”, but we have big plans to have Trazzler track the way users are adding trips and get much more sophisticated over time. We also tap into your social graph so you can see trips your friends like and see which trips have been wishlisted the most. This too will get better as we add compatibility matching.

We still have a lot more to do: bring your Facebook social graph to trazzler.com; merge your Facebook and Trazzler web accounts; widen our editorial coverage; develop a better algorithm. But we hope you like what we've got so far. Play with it, fantasize about trips with your friends, send them trips, and, please, let us know what you think.